To the editors:
In his essay “Unanswerable Questions” (Chicago Review, 61.2), Joe Luna launches a spirited attack on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, referring, with keen approval, to Adorno’s critique of the Tractatus, found in Hegel: Three Studies (1963)—a critique which I cite and discuss in my book Wittgenstein’s Ladder:
Wittgenstein’s maxim, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ [T #7], in which the extreme of positivism spills over into the gesture of reverent authoritarian authenticity, and which for that reasons exerts a kind of intellectual mass suggestion, is utterly antiphilosophical. If philosophy can be defined at all, it is an effort to express things one cannot speak about, to help express the nonidentical despite the fact that expressing it identifies it at the same time. Hegel attempts to do this.
Luna takes Adorno’s statement to be “still” the “most succinct criticism of Wittgenstein’s maxim”—a large claim given that more than half a century has elapsed since Adorno wrote Hegel: Three Studies and many trenchant critiques have been written. “The thoughtful labor that I have been arguing unanswerable questions perform,” observes Luna, “is utterly antithetical to Wittgenstein’s unanswerable intellectual dead ends.” And he adds: “The asinine rejection of Adorno’s critique of Wittgenstein in the professional blurb writer Marjorie Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996) in fact bespeaks a critical idiom keen to embrace the unanswerable in modern poetry, but desperately allergic to its erotetic implications. The hallmark of this kind of critical work—the dregs of a badly digested deconstructive inheritance—is the well-intentioned but profoundly inadequate valorization of what it nominates as the ethical value of the open-ended.”
The confusions here are multiple. First, Luna pays no attention to the particular context in which the Tractatus was produced, namely, that a book begun and intended as a treatise on logic became, in the course of Wittgenstein’s military experience in World War I, something rather different, culminating in a set of quasi-mystical propositions, rejecting his hitherto accepted ethical and metaphysical principles. “The sense of the world,” says the young and disillusioned Wittgenstein, “must lie outside the world.” Luna doesn’t distinguish between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, unaccountably applying Adorno’s critique of the Tractatus to the methodology of the Investigations—a book, incidentally, that Adorno merely dismissed without further discussion. But in his later writings, Wittgenstein is the first to insist that he is intentionally writing against conventional philosophy (which, for him, includes Hegel), which he regards not as a set of conclusions but as a procedure, a “language game.” His pressing questions and negative formulations are designed to make his readers more aware of their own assumptions, unquestioned generalizations, and propositions. “Philosophy,” for him, works always and only by such negative means.
To scold Wittgenstein for not having learned the lessons of Hegel thus makes little sense, because Wittgenstein is explicitly rejecting them. It’s a case of apples and oranges, and Luna never makes clear why Wittgenstein is wrong and Adorno right. Adorno, it seems, is beyond criticism, and indeed “as Adorno says. . .” is an orthodoxy of the current graduate classroom in Anglophone countries, though not at all in his native Germany. If you want to make a sophisticated Marxist intervention in a discussion of how to understand Keston Sutherland’s poetry, invoke the name Adorno! And watch your “questions” become more and more intriguingly “unanswerable.”
Argument, in any case, gives way to name-calling: my defense of Wittgenstein contra Adorno is dismissed as “asinine,” the “dregs of a badly digested deconstructive inheritance” that has generated “a critical idiom keen to embrace the unanswerable in modern poetry.” Such sloppy phraseology confutes Wittgenstein with Derrida or de Man—a linkage I have explicitly rejected—even as my admitted predilection for a poetry of complexity and difference is by no means synonymous with a poetry that makes an ethical value out of the “open-ended”—a term that not only connotes blandness but also lack of principle. But accuracy and specificity don’t much interest Luna, who, later in his essay, talks of “the logic of commensurability, which is still the reigning ideology of human life, whether in its longstanding liberal capitalist or increasingly white nationalist form.” Why “white”? What about Chinese capitalism, increasingly powerful around the globe? What is its “logic of commensurability”? This may be a “positivist” question, but what can one expect from a “professional blurb writer” as Luna calls me? The adjective “professional” by the way, is used inaccurately since no one receives a penny for writing a blurb.
Sincerely yours,
Marjorie Perloff
Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita
Stanford University